A Look Back at Primary Colors, Which Changed the Way We Talk (and Joke) About Politics

Twenty years ago, Primary Colors—a roman à clef loosely based on Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign—dropped like a novel-length Page Six blind item. Published anonymously (but later revealed to be the handiwork of Newsweek political columnist Joe Klein), the novel traded in gossip and dished tawdry tales. Staffers engage in passionless "campaign sex"—including a scandalous sexual encounter between the novel's narrator, Henry (a George Stephanopoulos-like campaign manager), and Susan Stanton (the Hillary Clinton character). And Jack Stanton, the Bill Clinton figure, survives a sex scandal with his wife's hairdresser, (the absurdly named) Cashmere McLeod, and inhales donuts by the dozen. Primary Colors sensationalized presidential politics in a way that no book before or since has done.

In 1996, like pogs and Alanis Morrissette, Primary Colors was inescapable. I vividly remember it occupying space on both my parents' nightstands that year. In the wake of its publication, the media launched a national manhunt to unmask the author. Speculation swirled that a staffer in the Clinton administration had written it. Seven months after the book's release, Klein held a press conference in July of 1996 and announced, "My name is Joe Klein, and I wrote Primary Colors," as if he was Tony Stark revealing himself to be Iron Man.

Primary Colors hadn't crossed my mind for more than a decade until last year when the book was used as a running visual joke in James Ponsoldt's David Foster Wallace film, The End of the Tour. That movie takes place in '96, and in it, different characters are seen clutching the Primary Colors hardcover edition, accurately depicting its ubiquity.

Newsweek columnist Joe Klein, who was the anonymous author of the book

Getty ImagesEvy Mages/NY Daily News Archive

Last week, I read Primary Colors and watched the 1998 movie based on the novel to see how they hold up in our present-day dystopia. Klein's book remains a breezy beach read, but in the past two decades its shock value has evaporated. After all, we've seen Frank Underwood push Zoe Barnes in front of a train on House of Cards, the British prime minister have sex with a pig on Black Mirror, and Anthony Weiner sent a sext with his child in the pic. By comparison, Primary Colors reads like a junior high social studies textbook.

Through the fictional Susan Stanton, Joe Klein drops clues at the kind of leader he thinks Hillary Clinton might become.

Yet Klein's gossip-laden prose is worth revisiting in 2016, only because, through the fictional Susan Stanton, he drops clues at the kind of leader he thinks Hillary might become. He paints Susan as a character who's never flustered by political chaos. In one scene, after Jack Stanton's team is frazzled and beleaguered by scandal after scandal, Klein writes:

Susan floated above the mayhem … she sat at the head of the table in the suite, carefully put together in a blue Armani blazer and gray slacks, with a cool lime silk blouse, drinking tea … Her eyes were clear, the least bloodshot of anyone's in the room; she was wearing mascara—and lipstick. She was making a statement. The rest of us were a mess.

Klein also gives Susan a competitive drive stronger than her husband's—strong enough to propel the Stantons to the White House. In one scene, she laments that the Mario Cuomo character, then governor of New York, probably won't challenge Jack Stanton in the presidential race. When asked why that disappoints her, Susan responds, "Because…I would love to have had the opportunity to crush that scumbag." Elsewhere, Klein describes Susan as "sharp, aggressive, funny" and lauds her strength in the face of personal embarrassment. Even though Jack Stanton is running for president, throughout Primary Colors, Klein seems to be endorsing Susan for the job.

Two years after the book sent shockwaves through DC, Mike Nichols and Elaine May teamed up for what would be their final collaboration to bring Primary Colors to the big screen (he directed, she wrote the screenplay). Like the book, the movie seems tame in today's post-House of Cards world. With John Travolta and Emma Thompson doing their best Bill and Hillary impressions, Primary Colors the movie feels like a two-and-a-half-hour SNL sketch without jokes.

May's screenplay excised some of the book's zanier plot points, like Susan having sex with the narrator. While that may have seemed like a smart deletion at the time, in hindsight cutting out the book's pulpy tone made it seem less like a wild romp and more like a Clinton biopic. The movie came out in the middle of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and supplied more ammunition to the right wing that lasts to this day. Last month, at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Rudy Giuliani said, "Bill Clinton was a predator president with a wife who enabled him…you've seen that movie with John Travolta."

'Primary Colors' serves as a bridge between the stogy political reporting of Theodore White's 'Making of the President' series and page turners like John Heilemann and Mark Halperin's 'Game Change' about the 2008 election.

John Travolta as Jack Stanton and Emma Thompson as Susan Stanton in

Universal

The legacy of Klein's Primary Colors is more than being a time capsule for the early '90s (although, lines like "James Cameron, awesome director. I live for his next movie," or a melee at a political rally described as "like a Nirvana concert," will make you long for the days of Yo! MTV Raps and Blossom). It serves as a bridge between the stogy political reporting of Theodore White's Making of the President series and page turners like John Heilemann and Mark Halperin's Game Change about the 2008 election. Primary Colors conditioned us to want the salacious behind-the-scenes details. What had to be fictionalized in 1996 today is laid bare in all-access documentaries like Weiner.

In the 2006 10th-anniversary edition of Primary Colors, Klein added an afterword. In it, on the eve of Hillary's failed 2008 campaign, he writes, "I think about taking another run [with these characters], although I'm pretty sure a Susan Stanton campaign for president wouldn't be nearly as much fun as Jack's." It's safe to say that Klein never anticipated the truly stranger-than-fiction Trump vs. Clinton showdown.

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